Home Altars – Create Your Own Sacred Space

Why Home Altars?

Besides providing a spiritual focus point in my home, creating and maintaining my home altar is a wonderful stress relief exercise. It makes me focus on the spiritual part of myself...

Altars are deliberately part of your everyday; they are not kept separate from your busy life like a retreat or an ashram. Your home altar is asacred space, made by you, that infuses the ordinary with the sacred...

Your altar in your home is an acknowledgment of your home as your safe harbour and your sacred space. And it is also a depiction of your own personal honouring of your spiritual self.

When I pass my altar and glance at the contents, I am mindfully reminded of what is durable and important in my life – gives me a good perspective check.

About Home Altars

Stretching way back into prehistory, people have been making altars where they live, turning their domestic place into a sacred space...

Wherever there is evidence of human habitation, the remains of altars have also been found.

Sometimes the altars are very simple and sometimes quite elaborate. In ancient Rome, every home, no matter how humble or grand, had an altar, and every altar held the special god-protectors of the home...

So, by creating your own altar, you are joining the age-old human wish to recognise, honour and feel the sacred in our mundane lives.

How To Set Up Your Home Altar

What are your favourite spiritual images? What comforts you? What is sacred to you?

Ask yourself a few of these questions and begin to mentally imagine your “personal space” or “sacred place” in a corner of your home, what it would look like and what it would contain.

Your sacred space can be a section of a windowsill, a table top, a shelf in your room or a whole meditation room – the size is not important...

My home altar is on an antique desk at the top of my passage, kind of in the central point of my home...

Begin simply by placing a cloth on a shelf or table. The cloth can be one of significance or of a specific color that has meaning to you. Everything about the space is ultimately personal.

One of the ways to create a home altar is to use earth elements and as a basis. The four elements are fire, water, earth, and air. Having these represented on your altar will tend to 'ground' the sacred place. Fire can be represented by candles; water by a bowl of water in which you might float a flower petal; earth can be symbolized by a rock; and air by incense...

Once you have grounded your sacred space, you can begin to add items that are meaningful to you: photographs of loved ones, living or departed; tokens that remind you of particular achievements or life events; objects, such as keys or jewellery, that carry for you messages of the spirit.

My Home Altar

On one side of my home altar I have a glass bowl given to me by my daughter, a ring of copper that my son cut and welded whilst training to be a plumber, a stone from the Orange River given to me by my step-daughter. These items sit around a silver lizard with a crystal in her arms – I see her as the carrier and keeper of messages. In the middle is a vase with two beaded pin-cushion protea flowers. These were made by a local African man and are a gift from me to my guardian angel...

Above my altar is a painting of an angel done by a local artist; she guards my home...

Next to her is a print of an angel that I saw in a cathedral in Siena whilst on holiday with my four sisters and my daughter. Three silver ducks (a gift from my beloved daughter) fly up the wall next to the angels. All of their wings spread a shield of protection on my home and remind me to be grateful. I have crystals and a candle in a bowl given to me by my sister, Gillian; along with other crystals pointing to the four corners of the earth. Some happy Buddhas encircle this bowl and are joined on my home altar by various candles and incense...

So you can see that the important thing is that you must express your own self and make your sacred space personal and meaningful.

Tips For Home Altars

Home altars are not about decorating. Your sacred space is highly personal and is a spiritual representation.

Keep your home altar dusted and fresh so that the energy is always vibrant and clear.

Change the objects as your needs change.

Encourage your kids to make their own simple altar – a spot where they display meaningful objects.

Have fun creating your sacred space. It belongs to you.

Create your home altars to help you focus and clarify your thoughts and intentions.